Working Party, Glen Etive

13th-15th June 2008

A Vision.

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing it, enriching it...

then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live here,

their houses strongly placed upon the valleys sides...
The river will run clear, as we will never know it...

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest,
an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The viens of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...

Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove,

and memory will grow into legend, legend into song,
song into sacrament. 

The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.

This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

[Work in progress by working party, poem by Wendell Berry]